2026 Real Estate Model and Innovation Excellence Performance 10: China Merchants Shekou, CITIC City Development, CapitaLand Explore New Paths

Summary: The old model can no longer adapt to the new supply-and-demand dynamics. The gap among real estate developers is increasingly showing up in their ability to reconstruct business models and implement innovation on the ground.

The industry has entered a period of deep adjustment. The logic of high turnover, high leverage, and using scale to drive growth has clearly seen its marginal utility weaken. What truly determines whether a company can stand its ground is no longer just how many homes it sells, but whether it can reorganize development, operations, services, asset management, and capital tools to form a more stable revenue structure and a clearer operational closed loop.

Model innovation and innovation decide how a company will survive in the future and what it will rely on to survive, turning into real-world practice. By building core competitiveness through business model innovation and differentiated competition.

“2026 Real Estate Models and Innovation Excellence Performance 10,” based on comprehensive research systems covering product uniqueness, innovative production methods, marketing methods and organization, and capital utilization and financing, among other areas, it reviews real estate companies that, over the past year, demonstrated outstanding business model and innovation capabilities and maintained advantages amid market changes.

From the research results, the top three are China Merchants Shekou, Citic Chengkai, and CapitaLand Development. Closely following them are China Resources Land, Yuexiu Property, Poly Developments and Holdings, Longfor Group, China Overseas Enterprise Group, Xincheng Holdings, and COFCO Real Estate, among other companies.

China Merchants Shekou embeds asset operations into the company’s main operating pathway. It has already built an end-to-end asset operation development model covering “invest, finance, construct, manage, and exit.” Development business focuses on improving quality and accelerating destocking; on the asset side, it speeds up asset revitalization; and property services and entrusted development continue to seek incremental gains from the market. For China Merchants Shekou, urban renewal, industrial parks, apartments, commercial offices, and entrusted development are no longer fragmented pieces of a business jigsaw. Instead, they follow a single operations logic, and the benefits of platform-based integration have become clearly effective.

Citic Chengkai abandons the path dependence of the traditional approach of “building a new city,” anchoring its core competitiveness in a closed-loop restructuring capability that resolves complex issues through “industry-finance coordination” and remolds the value of non-performing assets. The company focuses on industry-finance coordination to hedge risks and has formed a mature risk-hedging model with distinctive Citic characteristics: “financial support + risk isolation + asset management.” Among them, the Shenzhen Xinyuewan project is one of the representative works. Citic Chengkai makes a substantive entry into deep-water areas of financing structures, engineering development, China Merchants Shekou and operations. With this set of hard capabilities that break through the barriers between finance and the real economy, and re-gather people and cash flow, it substantially opens up a commercialization path for “comprehensive resolution of difficulties and asset operations” in the inventory era.

The model characteristics demonstrated by CapitaLand Development are a composite development path. Its business spans multiple types of business formats, including integrated developments, residential, offices, retail, logistics, and data centers. In 2025, CapitaLand Development (China) specifically established a sustainable services platform (CSBS), exploring a “platform + services” approach to embed sustainable concepts into the full lifecycle of its assets. As of September 2025, the total value of CapitaLand Development’s investment portfolio had reached 18.5 billion New Taiwan dollars?（185亿 New Yuan）. CapitaLand Development’s mutual coordination among capital tool implementation, the establishment of a fund platform, and the reserve of diversified assets indicates that what it is advancing is not only project development itself, but an integrated operating mechanism built around asset consolidation, value-added operations, and capital exit.

The focus of China Resources Land no longer stays at the maturity of development scale, but at the maturity of comprehensive operations capabilities. During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, China Resources Land achieved the shift from building a first growth curve to building a second growth curve. During the “15th Five-Year Plan” period, China Resources Land will construct three growth curves through strategic planning. By leveraging efficient synergies and acting in the same direction, it will form an entirely new business model for comprehensive, high-quality development, enabling a major strategic upgrade of its business model. In the past two years, China Resources Land’s strategic framework has become clearer, and it has gradually formed an efficient strategic synergy. Multiple business lines, including development, commercial, and asset management, are being advanced simultaneously.

Yuexiu Property is gradually thickening its product base—covering TOD, commercial offices, green financing, and various other project types. Focusing on city development and deepening and strengthening the TOD model, pan-TOD projects have been rolled out across multiple cities. On the capital side, continuous issuance of green dim sum bonds makes the links among projects, assets, and financing tools tighter. In residential development, it establishes market recognizability; commercial offices and TOD incubate long-term value; and green finance improves the efficiency of asset organization. Through Yuexiu REIT, it builds a “development + operations + finance” dual-platform interaction model. In addition, Yuexiu Property has implemented innovative initiatives such as expanding non-residential formats, a light-asset operations model, and digital transformation, enhancing the company’s risk resilience and core competitiveness.

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